Real Estate Trends – Rockland, Massachusetts #2

Introduction:

Welcome back again for our latest real estate market trend report. For those of you that are here for the first time what we do in these reports is examine the real estate market in a city or town in Massachusetts or New Hampshire to evaluate the current conditions. We do this by looking at the changes in three key metrics year over year for the municipality to see how the market has changed and then evaluate what those observations might mean for that market moving forward.

Market Trends in Rockland, MA – April 2015 and 2016:

The Rockland, MA market has fallen off significantly since last year. The average prices and the median prices were down quite a lot. The days on market were down a lot however. Inventory was pretty flat with 11 sales in April of 2015 up to 12 in April 2016.

Average Listing Prices:

We will first start off by looking at the average listing price. In Rockland, MA the average listing price in April 2015 was $354,572. This was down to $277,309 in April 2016. This gives a major decrease of 21.79% year over year.

Looking at the median prices we see that they were higher in both years. For April of 2015 the median listing price for Rockland, MA was $389,900 and in April 2016 it was $284,900 which now gives an even larger decrease of 26.93%.

Average Sale Prices:

The next thing we will be looking at is the average sale prices. The average sale price for in Rockland, MA in April of 2015 was $354,013 and in April 2016 that was down to $266,406. That gives another huge decrease of 24.75%, and slightly larger than the average list price.

We see a different pattern than we did for the median list price. In this case it was still lower in 2016 but was actually slightly higher in 2015. For April of 2015 the median sales price for Bedford, MA was $390,000 and in April 2016 it was $286,276 giving another very large decrease of 26.60%.

There have definitely been substantial price drops for Rockland, MA in April. The averages and the medians were all down in excess of 20%. Overall the range was roughly 22-27% so not a huge disparity in the 4 metrics. Medians are the preferred method when looking at real estate prices and those were both very tight being just under 27% for both the listing and sale prices. Therefore the best conclusion is that prices are most likely down just about 27% for Rockland, MA this month.

Average Days on Market:

Finally the last metric we look at are the average days on market, which is the measure of how long it takes for a property to sell in the current market. For Rockland, MA the average days on market in April of 2015 were 180.45 and the average days on market for April 2016 were 101.00 for a large 44.03% decrease.

It is worth noting that we often adjust these numbers when a blatant outlying data point skews the data. In this case in 2015 there were 2 ridiculously high days on market houses that were both right around 600. Nothing else was even as high as 200 and the general distribution of the other houses looks very similar to the 2016 houses. I definitely believe there BOTH of these places might be statistical outliers that could be eliminated. However, as mentioned in the past we are not going to do any rigorous analysis to make that call, we only eliminate single points that would clearly be eliminated with a statistical analysis. Therefore while we are NOT making any adjustment to these numbers just keep in mind they MAY be skewed a bit on the high side.

Rockland, Massachusetts Summary:

The Rockland, Massachusetts real estate market is down a lot since last year. The average prices were down significantly while the median prices were down even more. The days on market were down a lot though.

In summary if you are looking to sell a house in Rockland, MA now you should expect to get a lot less for it than you would have gotten last year. However you can also expect it to take a lot less time to sell compared to last year as well.